The discussions in these sessions aim to bring together South Asia scholars, digital humanities specialists, data librarians, subject specialists, research software & programming engineers, and manuscript studies curators to engage in conversation about the field of collections as data at large.
Andrew Ollett, Associate Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, will deliver the keynote address "Texts as Data: Tools and Perspectives for South Asianists."
The workshop will be held from 9:30am - 5:00pm on October 10 and from 9:30am - 4:00pm on October 11. The talks are open to the public, may be presented in a hybrid format, and will be recorded for sharing at a later date. See below for complete program schedule.
Apply to Participate in Hands-On Sessions
South Asia Studies scholars are invited to apply to participate in hands-on workshop sessions held during this event. These sessions will introduce scholars of South Asia to digital tools for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for the practical purpose of searching through texts for specific keywords. OCR and HTR make it possible to transform archival sources into searchable texts. Participants in the hands-on sessions must be prepared to attend both days of the workshop as well as a prior software installation session.
Organizers
- Kashi Gomez, Sanskrit Lecturer, Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania
- Jajwalya Karajgikar, Applied Data Science Librarian, Research Data and Digital Scholarship, University of Pennsylvania Libraries
Session Facilitators
- Eug Xu, Data Science & Society Research Assistant, Research Data and Digital Scholarship, University of Pennsylvania Libraries
- Dot Porter, Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies Curator of Digital Humanities, University of Pennsylvania Libraries
- Andy Janco, Research Software Engineer, Research Data and Digital Scholarship, University of Pennsylvania Libraries
- Doug Emery, Special Collections Digital Content Programmer, Cultural Heritage Computing, University of Pennsylvania Libraries
- Jessie Dummer, Digitization Project Coordinator, Cultural Heritage Computing, University of Pennsylvania Libraries
Sponsors
This workshop is sponsored by the Department of South Asia Studies, Research Data and Digital Scholarship's AI Literacy Interest Group, the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, The Penn South Asia Center, the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and the Wolf Humanities Center.